ABSTRACT
Did you know that roughly 80% of the information you receive through your television set is of absolutely no use to you? Yes, I know that sometimes it seems like 80% of the programmes in the schedule are repeats, cookery or gardening, but even if you are watching a particularly gripping episode of your favourite drama series, you can still only appreciate about a fifth of the information content that makes up the sound and picture. The human visual system is particularly selective in what it chooses to see. It has to do this in order to make a reasonable amount of sense of the world, and a vast amount of useless information is simply ignored. Existing video and television systems take advantage of this, for example by not recording or transmitting any fine detail in the colour component of the image, since the eye’s sensitivity to detail in colour is roughly a third of its sensitivity to the fine detail in the brightness of a scene. This is due to the physical construction of the eye itself, but the brain also filters out irrelevant information. Once the brain has recognized the player with the ball, it is freed from the duty of facial recognition so you can give your full attention to marvelling at his playing skills.
